This document will guide you through installing Python 3.8 and Django on
Windows. It also provides instructions for setting up a virtual environment,
which makes it easier to work on Python projects. This is meant as a beginner’s
guide for users working on Django projects and does not reflect how Django
should be installed when developing patches for Django itself.

The steps in this guide have been tested with Windows 10. In other
versions, the steps would be similar. You will need to be familiar with using
the Windows command prompt.

Django is a Python web framework, thus requiring Python to be installed on your
machine. At the time of writing, Python 3.8 is the latest version.

To install Python on your machine go to https://python.org/downloads/. The
website should offer you a download button for the latest Python version.
Download the executable installer and run it. Check the boxes next to “Install
launcher for all users (recommended)” then click “Install Now”.

After installation, open the command prompt and check that the Python version
matches the version you installed by executing:

pip is a package manager for Python and is included by default with the
Python installer. It helps to install and uninstall Python packages
(such as Django!). For the rest of the installation, we’ll use pip to
install Python packages from the command line.

It is best practice to provide a dedicated environment for each Django project
you create. There are many options to manage environments and packages within
the Python ecosystem, some of which are recommended in the Python
documentation.
Python itself comes with venv for managing
environments which we will use for this guide.

To create a virtual environment for your project, open a new command prompt,
navigate to the folder where you want to create your project and then enter the
following:

...\> py -m venv project-name

This will create a folder called ‘project-name’ if it does not already exist
and setup the virtual environment. To activate the environment, run:

...\> project-name\Scripts\activate.bat

The virtual environment will be activated and you’ll see “(project-name)” next
to the command prompt to designate that. Each time you start a new command
prompt, you’ll need to activate the environment again.

If django-admin only displays the help text no matter what arguments
it is given, there is probably a problem with the file association in
Windows. Check if there is more than one environment variable set for
running Python scripts in PATH. This usually occurs when there is more
than one Python version installed.

If you are connecting to the internet behind a proxy, there might be problems
in running the command py-mpipinstallDjango. Set the environment
variables for proxy configuration in the command prompt as follows: